Giant chess held in Riley’s honor at Wooldridge Square last weekend. Photo by James Rambin
Although he’s often called the originator of Austin’s urbanist movement, Chris Riley is really just a guy who believes in the potential of cities as places for people. As a former City Council member, co-founder of the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association, and a friend of everyone involved with this site since the beginning, Chris revealing that his cancer diagnosis from last year had reached an incurable stage came as a shock to everyone in the downtown community — if you’d like to catch up on everything Riley’s done for the city over the last 30 years, please read the wonderful career retrospective published by our friend Jack Craver last week.
Today I wrote about the grandaddy of Austin urbanism, Chris Riley, who tells me that he's at peace with death because –– among other things –– he believes his hometown's future is in good hands. https://t.co/rzr5j5Prh3
— Jack Craver (@JackCraver) July 8, 2024
Although he’s at peace with nearing the end of his life, Riley has unfinished business, and he’s asked us to tell you all about it. Having lived downtown since 1990, he says one feature of his neighborhood has sadly stayed the same — Wooldridge Square, one of Austin’s original public squares, remains unappreciated. While Republic Square and Brush Square have seen a renaissance in recent years, Wooldridge, surrounded mostly by government buildings and parking lots in a region of downtown with fewer residential buildings and less foot traffic than its peers, is sadly the odd square out.
Despite a historical legacy including the announcement of Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 campaign for senate and a 1911 speech by Booker T. Washington attended by thousands after the famed Black orator was denied from speaking at the Capitol by the Texas Legislature, in more recent decades the square has never quite achieved sustained public activity — except, of course, for giant chess on Saturday afternoons, hosted by Riley under the historic Wooldridge bandstand regularly since 2002 with help from volunteer chess enthusiasts and sponsored by the Austin Parks Foundation. Although he obviously likes chess, Riley says the giant game board was simply an eye-catching solution for getting people excited about Wooldridge Square, an excuse to get a crowd into the park to experience the potential of this space for themselves.
An Austin American-Statesman photo of a 2005 giant chess tournament at Wooldridge Square. Image: Austin History Center
The original flyer advertising giant chess at Wooldridge Square in the early 2000s. Image: Austin Giant Chess
Now that Riley is unable to continue hosting the event himself, he says he’s hoping to find a member of the community willing to carry on the giant chess tradition at Wooldridge after he’s gone. Since the main goal of the event is activating forgotten urban spaces like the square, he’s wary of a more serious chess group taking over as organizers and scaring off casual players — the intent, he says, is keeping a sense of community and identity in a corner of downtown that often struggles to have one.
Photo by James Rambin
In honor of Riley and his decades of advocacy for urban life in Austin, we’re trying to help him get the word out. If you or anyone you know would be willing to volunteer their time to keep giant chess alive at Wooldridge Square, please reach out to me directly at james@towers.net.
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